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| Welcome to the webbed and wired edition of R&R, aristotle. We’ll be doing the same sort of song and dance here as we do in print: reviewing the latest comics and cartoon-related books and ranting about trends and abuses and unfathomable foolishnesses. Each installment will stay here for about four weeks, with a new one coming in just about every other week or so. If you don’t have the time to ponder every punctuation mark in this deathless prose and merely want to see what might be there that would interest you, we suggest you scroll down the page looking for the bold-face type that heralds the notables who reside herein this week. So here we go with the Opus 255 (and a reprise of Opus 254):
Opus 255: Playboy’s First Decade, Gaiman in The New Yorker, Scouting’s Centennial & Daytripper (February 3, 2010).
Opus 254: The Best in 2009 Cartooning, the Latest in Islamic Hooliganism & Farewell to David Levine (January 13, 2010).
Opus 255 (February 3, 2010). The bargain-priced DVD of all of Playboy for its first
decade, 1953-1959, prompted us to re-visit the magazine and the cartoonists who
made it home during that formative ten years—Jack Cole, of course, but also the
unknown (or at least unheralded) Draber—and so we spent an inordinate amount
number of sentences marking first appearances and other innovations ushered into the
modern era by founding publisher Hugh M. Hefner. We also celebrate the centennial of
the Boy Scouts of America by digging up the cartoons and illustrations of one of its
founders, Dan Beard; and ponder the myopia of a New Yorker profile of Neil Gaiman.
And (trying to make up for our dereliction lately) we review a dozen new funnybooks, all
listed below. Yes, I know we were going to do Osamu Tezuka this time; but the Playboy
bargain just sucked up all the space—that and the surprise interview with Bill
Watterson. Next time, Osamu Tezuka. This time, here’s what’s here, in order, by
department:
Watterson Interview NOUS R US Amazon’s Top Ten Comics and Graphic Novels Women in Comics Week Twilight Graphic Novel Preview Avatar’s Box Office Record How Many Have Died in the Funnies? Neil Gaiman in The New Yorker P. Craig Russell on The Dream Hunter Alan Moore’s New Magazine Feiffer’s Memoir HAPPY BIRTHDAY Boy Scouts of America: 100 Years Old Dan Beard, Founder and Cartoonist EDITOONERY Good Ones This Week Airport Security BOOK MARQUEE New Books Now Available BOOK REVIEWS Two Bargains: The Completely Mad Don Martin and Playboy Cover to Cover, 1950s Early Playboy Content and Its Cartoons 1953-1959 FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE Dominick Fortune, 1-4 Archie Nuptial Saga, 603-605 Stumptown, 2 The Last Resort, 1-5 28 Days Later Glamourpuss, 10 FIRST ISSUES: Daytripper Cowboy Ninja Viking Nomad: Girl Without a World Greek Street The Eternal Conflicts of the Cosmic Warrior Black Widow: Deadly Origin And our customary reminder: when you get to the $ubscriber/Associate Section (perusal of which is restricted to paid subscribers), don’t forget to activate the “Bathroom Button” by clicking on the “print friendly version” so you can print off a copy of just this installment for reading later, at your leisure while enthroned. Without further adieu, then, here we go— NO REGRETS: WATTERSON’S FIRST INTERVIEW IN 15 (OR SO) YEARS Fresh newly crafted Calvin and Hobbes comic strips haven’t been in the newspaper for fourteen years. During that time, the strip’s creator, Bill Watterson, has been absent from the public prints, refusing to be interviewed or photographed. But Watterson grew up in Chagrin Falls and still makes Greater Cleveland his home, and he presumably has some residual affection, even loyalty, to the local paper, the Plain Dealer. Whatever the reason, Watterson recently answered some questions via e-mail from reporter John Campanelli. It's believed to be the first interview with the reclusive artist since 1989, apart from some exchanges in connection with the publication of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes in 2005; the following was published February 1, 2010. Q. With almost 15 years of separation and reflection, what do you think it was about Calvin and Hobbes that went beyond just capturing readers' attention, but their hearts as well? A. The only part I understand is what went into the creation of the strip. What readers take away from it is up to them. Once the strip is published, readers bring their own experiences to it, and the work takes on a life of its own. Everyone responds differently to different parts. I just tried to write honestly, and I tried to make this little world fun to look at, so people would take the time to read it. That was the full extent of my concern. You mix a bunch of ingredients, and once in a great while, chemistry happens. I can't explain why the strip caught on the way it did, and I don't think I could ever duplicate it. A lot of things have to go right all at once. Q. What are your thoughts about the legacy of your strip? A. Well, it's not a subject that keeps me up at night. Readers will always decide if the work is meaningful and relevant to them, and I can live with whatever conclusion they come to. Again, my part in all this largely ended as the ink dried. Q. Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved—and are still grieving—when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them? A. This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason Calvin and Hobbes still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it. I've never regretted stopping when I did. Q. Because your work touched so many people, fans feel a connection to you, like they know you. They want more of your work, more Calvin, another strip, anything. It really is a sort of rock star/fan relationship. Because of your aversion to attention, how do you deal with that even today? And how do you deal with knowing that it's going to follow you for the rest of your days? A. Ah, the life of a newspaper cartoonist— how I miss the groupies, drugs and trashed hotel rooms! But since my "rock star" days, the public attention has faded a lot. In Pop Culture Time, the 1990s were eons ago. There are occasional flare-ups of weirdness, but mostly I just go about my quiet life and do my best to ignore the rest. I'm proud of the strip, enormously grateful for its success, and truly flattered that people still read it, but I wrote Calvin and Hobbes in my 30s, and I'm many miles from there. An artwork can stay frozen in time, but I stumble through the years like everyone else. I think the deeper fans understand that, and are willing to give me some room to go on with my life. Q. How soon after the U.S. Postal Service issues the Calvin stamp will you send a letter with one on the envelope? A. Immediately. I'm going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription. Q. How do you want people to remember that 6-year-old and his tiger? A. I vote for "Calvin and Hobbes, Eighth Wonder of the World." For more about Watterson, including a link to samples of the editorial cartoons he drew for the Sun Newspapers, go here: cleveland.com/living/index.ssf/2010/02/bill_watterson_creator_of_belo.html ***** Reporter Campanelli, a comics enthusiast and former college cartoonist, scored his interview with the J.D. Salinger of cartooning without ruse. He’d started out thinking he would review Nevin Martell’s recent book, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes. “Instead of doing an article on the book,” Campanelli told Michael Cavna at Washington Post’s Comic Riffs blog, “I wanted to use the book— and the announcement of the [Calvin and Hobbes] postage stamp and the 15th anniversary of the retirement of the strip—as hooks for a wider-look article on the timelessness and enduring nature of the strip itself." To that purpose, he e-mailed Watterson a list of questions, but he was well aware of Watterson’s reputation as a recluse, so he wasn’t very hopeful of a response. “To my complete amazement,” Campanelli said, “—he responded. I've never had contact with him before.” He has no idea why Watterson chose to speak at this time, but he did so without imposing any limits or conditions. “When he sent his answers, Watterson mentioned that he trusted his words would be used in context and that the questions behind them would be clear. That's it.” Asked if there was any one thing about Watterson's responses that most surprised or intrigued him, Campanelli said: “You mean, besides that he answered them at all? I'd say what most intrigued me was his frank insight and, of course, his humor. And that he has never regretted leaving the comics pages when he did. Amazing.” NOUS R US Some of All the News That Gives Us Fits Until this year, the National Cartoonists Society judged graphic novels with comic books in the same category division of NCS’s annual Reuben awards. But this year, for the first time, NCS recognizes that the graphic novel is a separate, and different, genre of cartooning than the comic book. It’s about time. ... Last summer, Ruben Boling’s weekly altie strip, Tom the Dancing Bug (which doesn’t seem to be about a dancing bug—or anyone called “Tom”), won the Association of Alternate Newsweeklies’ award for Best Cartoon. A live-action comedy featuring one of the strip’s characters, Harvey Richards, Lawyer for Children, is in development at New Line Cinema. In Amsterdam, popular lawmaker Geert Wilders failed on January 13 to get a judge to reduce or drop charges against him for his 2008 short film “Fitna,” which offended many Muslims by juxtaposing Koranic verses with images of terrorism by Islamic hoodlums. Wilders is scheduled to go on trial in March for “insulting Muslims as a group and inciting hatred and discrimination against them”; Wilders argued that his anti-Islam message is protected as freedom of speech, but he lost this preliminary bout. Amazon.com listed the top ten “editor’s picks and customer favorite” comics and graphic novels for 2009, in order, we assume, of popularity: Stitches, George Sprott, Asterios Polyp, All-Star Superman, the Umbrella Academy: Dallas, Locas II, The Photographer, A Drifting Life, The [Illustrated] Book of Genesis, and Masterpiece Comics. ... Kim Thompson at Fantagraphics tells me that my magnum opus, Meanwhile: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, is nearly sold out: only about 400 of the initial press run of 3,500 still remain in the publisher’s warehouse. And I have a few left here, too, safely ensconced in the Rancid Raves Book Grotto and Gallery below; more about the book here. ... Both the McCoys, Gary and Glenn, had a cartoon in Parade’s “Cartoon Parade” January 10. Can you tell the difference in styles? (A question you can’t answer until you get over the wall to the $ubscriber/Associate section, kimo sabe.) ... Joe Sacco is making a splash in various of the public prints with reviews of his new 400-page graphic novel/reportage about Israeli atrocities in 1956, Footnotes in Gaza. Accused of an anti-Israeli bias, Sacco says: “It’s up to us to fill history’s glass with as much truthful, cogent testimony as we can.” ... Collector comic books still make news with their reputed monetary value. Detective Comics No. 27, in which Batman debuted, is expected to bring in at least a record $300,000 at a February 25 auction, says Jeff Bounds at Dallas Business Journal, quoting Noah Fleisher, director of public relations at Dallas-based Heritage, the third-largest auction house in the world. ***** “Women in Comics” week is coming, March 21-17, inspired, doubtless, by the prospect of selling more comics while also nodding ceremoniously to “the women who work in the industry and create the comics and the women who star in the comics we read each month” (Previews). The magazine’s “brand manager” Jim Meyer interviewed Gail Simone, who has lately hove into view writing the adventures of Wonder Woman, “the most iconic woman in comics,” who is also one of the most problematic. It has never been quite decided, for once and all, whether Wonder Woman (aka Diana Prince) should be a sexy superheroine or a feminist icon. Herewith a few out-takes from the Simone interview, published in the January Previews. On Wonder Woman: “Greg Rucka, one of the best Wonder Woman writers of the modern age, has said that the problem with Wonder Woman was that she was fragmented each time a new writer came on and abandoned everything the previous writers had done. I agree, so my goal was to present a human Diana, someone who had some wit and charm and an inner life, but also someone who was cohesive. ... Mainly, I wanted to ditch the idea of an arrogant speechifying aristocrat: that’s never felt like Diana to me. “ On being a woman in the comic book biz: “I love being a woman. I love being a woman who writes. But being a ‘woman writer’ is not nearly as important to me. ... Each year that goes by, I feel a little bit less like an oddity. The industry welcomed me; pros I had worshiped when I was little were incredibly kind and supportive. And now I look out and see Ivory Madison and Kathryn Immonen and Nicola Scott and so many other fierce women of impact and talent, and it all feels like a road we’re walking that’s headed somewhere wonderful. I walked it because Colleen Doran and Jill Thompson walked it for me, after Ramona Fradon and Marie Severin paved the way. People don’t buy Nicola Scott-drawn books because she’s female; they buy them because she draws like a damn bandit. ... Every interview Dwayne McDuffie [an African American comics writer] is asked about blacks in comics, when what the audience cares about is that he’s a brilliant writer. Really, what is wanted is not ‘more Asian creators.’ What is wanted is a wide range of voices, and the best available talent.” ***** Passing Through. Several notable toilers in the vineyards of popular culture left us in the last month. Erich Segal made us all weep with the novel and then the movie “Love Story” about a young college man and his wife, who dies of cancer soon after they marry; Segal died January 17 at the age of 72. Robert B. Parker, who wrote more than 50 novels, 37 of them about a Boston private eye named just Spenser, no other name, died at 77. Movie actress Jean Simmons, whose career flourished in the 1950s and 1960s in such films as “Guys and Dolls” and “Elmer Gantry” and “Spartacus,” died at 80. The “other Lone Ranger,” John Hart, the actor who took over after Clayton Moore left the tv masked man in 1952, died at 91. Hart also played Jack Armstrong in the 1947 Columbia serial of that name, based upon the radio program of the late 1930s and 1940s. French cartoonist Jacques Martin, creator of the popular comic book hero Alix and Herge’s collaborator for 19 years on the Tintin books, died at 88. And Jerome David Salinger, who wanted to be the “catcher in the rye” and caught, with his book by that name, the anti-phoney spirit of an age—specifically, teenage—died at 91, no better known to us on the day of his death than he’d been for most of his obsessively reclusive life. He was, in fact, “as famous for being a non-publishing recluse as for anything he had written,” observed Mike Littwin in the Denver Post. Some students of modern life, Littwin goes on, believe that The Catcher in the Rye would not impact today’s teenagers as much as it did before Facebook: “Holden’s self-involved take on the world is hardly radical anymore when kids self-publish every self-involved thought” in their heads on the Web. “One writer makes the case that ‘teenager’ is now less a time of life than it is a consumer demographic.” Perhaps. Although adolescent self-involvement as a manifestation of “I’m the center of the universe” is still a fairly wide-spread affliction, I’d say, so Holden Caulfield is probably still relevant. Salinger kept writing, they say, but stopped publishing; perhaps, now that he has been removed from any possibility of unwanted public adoration and acclaim, his children, or his agent, will be able to publish what he’s written all these years since he stopped publishing in 1965. GRAPHIC NOVEL PREVIEW The January 29 issue of Entertainment Weekly (the issue with a discombobulated Jay Leno on the cover) published eight pages of the 72-page Twilight Graphic Novel as a special preview of manhwa artist Young Kim’s adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s prose novel, due for a March 16 release. With this kind of publicity, “it is no surprise,” notes ICv2, “that Twilight’s publisher, Yen Press, has set a mammoth 350,000 first print run” for the book. In an interview with EW’s Tina Jordan, author Meyer said she was pleased with Kim’s work: “Reading her version brought me back to the feeling I had when I was writing and it was just me and the characters again. I love that. I thank her for it.” Kim depicts young people as far too beautiful for my taste—and they’re all beautiful, not an ordinary-looking person in the lot. And the book perpetuates the annoying practice of printing speech balloons as semi-transparent bubbles through which we can see people and backgrounds. But I suppose Twilight fans will be ecstatic. Or moribund, if that’s their pleasure. Kim based her adaptation on Meyer’s novel not on the movie. Said Meyer: “It was important to us both that this novel be an interpretation of the novel rather than a cartoon version of the movie. Young took her inspiration direction from the descriptions in the novel, and as a result, the images are much closer to the characters I see in my head than any actual human being could be.” Meyer approved all the art, requesting only minor adjustments—the way a character’s hair was rendered, for instance. “I also asked for the cars to be changed to exactly the models that I’d described,” she said, admitting “no one cares about that besides me.” Meyer said she’s not working on any new Twight-based project at the moment; “but there’s still a possibility that I’ll go back and close some of the open doors” some day in the future. IN MOTION At the Denver Post, Lisa Kennedy said about “The Book of Eli”: “The Hughes brothers have given audiences a graphic-novel flick, but there’s no comic-book series out there on which it’s based. They enlisted comic-book artists to help hone the look, a mix of sharp duns and grays. And writer Gary Whitta, who has done most of his work in videogames and comic books, has crafted a script nearly as methodical and deliberate as its hero [played by Denzel Washington].” Used to be—remember?—when a film critic likened a movie to a comic book, it wasn’t a compliment. Walt Disney Pictures has started shooting Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “John Carter of Mars” in London; it will star Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins; ICv2 prints a leggy picture of Collins next to its announcement. Neither Tobey Maguire nor director Sam Raimi will be involved in “Spider-Man
4,” which, saith the Associated Press, will focus on Peter Parker in high school. The
change in personnel is occasioned, some said, by “creative differences” about the
future of the franchise. Jerome Maida at the Philadelphia News recorded some
reactions: "I actually think it's a good idea," said local writer/artist J.S. Earls (Pistolfist). "It's all about communication and if you keep telling stories with the same actors and
directors, it's more difficult to communicate with your audience effectively." Said writer Brandon Jerwa ("Battlestar Galactica"): "Personally, I wish Sony would go with the
more mature Peter Parker, employed as a teacher and juggling a couple of girlfriends,
Mary Jane and the Black Cat, maybe? They'll never go that route, but Neil Patrick
Harris would be my pick if they did. I don't necessarily think anyone should freak out
over the reboot, but I'm definitely a little nervous about how this will play out. Ultimately,
I blame Jay Leno." ***** On January 24, ICv2.com tried to come to grips with the box office phenomenon of “Avatar”: “‘Avatar’ is the first film since [John Cameron’s other film] ‘Titanic’ to top the box office for six consecutive weekends. Overseas the film has now earned $1.288 billion, eclipsing ‘Titanic’s’ 13-year-old international box office record of $1.242 billion. Of course adjusted for ticket price inflation, ‘Titanic’s’ total would be in the neighborhood of $1.66 billion. Meanwhile ‘Avatar’s’ domestic total has swelled to nearly $553 million eclipsing ‘The Dark Knight’ and within easy range of ‘Titanic’s’ record total of $600.7 million.” A few short but profitable days later, “Avatar” surpassed “Titanic’s” record. “Still,” ICv2 went on, “to put ‘Avatar’s’ considerable financial achievements in perspective, in spite of its record-setting performance, Cameron’s 3D outer space saga has still sold fewer tickets than ‘Home Alone,’ ‘Forrest Gump,’ and the first Spider-Man film.” Entertainment Weekly bent over even more in trying to put “Avatar” in its place. Adjusting for ticket-price inflation, “Avatar” plummets to 34th place in the top-earners list, “just a few notches above ‘Pinocchio.’” By this measure, “Gone with the Wind” is still at the top of the heap, followed by: ‘Star Wars,’ ‘The Sound of Music,’ ‘E.T.,’ ‘The Ten Commandments,’ ‘Titanic,’ ‘Jaws,’ ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ ‘The Exorcist,’ and ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ The Pope, meanwhile, is not happy with “Avatar”: the Vatican newspaper faults the movie for flirting with the idea that nature worship can replace religion, “a notion the Pope has warned against,” reported the Associated Press. Ross Douthat at the New York Times sees “Avatar” as a “long apologia for pantheism—a faith that equates God with Nature and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.” Not a bad idea, said Gus di Zerega at Beliefnet.com: the movie’s message is that “completeness is achieved in connection with others, that harmony is the basic value and its loss the basic failing of the modern mentality.” What this world needs is more pantheists, di Zerega says, and fewer religious fanatics and “narcissistic armchair warriors eager to see others fight in endless wars.” ***** When filmmaker Oren Peli moved into a new house with his girlfriend, they heard noises during the night. “It started me thinking about setting up a video camera and letting it run while you’re asleep,” Peli told Walter Scott at Parade. “How scary would it be to go through the footage afterwards and see something happening that shouldn’t be happening?” And that’s how “Paranormal Activity” was made. It cost $15,000 to produce and has earned, as of January 10 or so, about $100 million. DEATH IN THE FUNNIES When Lisa Moore, a character in Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean, died of breast cancer in the fall of 2007, it was a major sensation and inspired countless accolades in the news media about how mature (i.e., serious) the funnies had become. Batiuk’s motive was, at first, simple: he wanted to grow as a writer by dealing with disturbing human situations; and he hoped the story, for which he, a cancer survivor himself, did a lot of research, would help people who either have cancer or who have friends or relatives with cancer. Presumably, Batiuk was successful in both his objectives: he demonstrated great skill—sensitivity and understanding as well as mastery of his medium—in handling the Lisa story, and the American Cancer society named the cartoonist to its Cancer Care Hall of Fame. Lisa, however, was not the only comic strip character to die in the history of the comics. Sam Fulwood III, reporting at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Batiuk’s hometown newspaper, identified at least ten other comic strip characters who died. The first were in George Storm’s Phil Hardy in 1925: several supporting players were killed off during a mutiny. Comics historian Bill Blackbeard gave these deaths historic significance, saying the presence of death in comic strips made adventure continuity strips possible: if a character could die, that ramped up the reality in adventuring to a life-threatening levels. Then in The Gumps, Mary Gold, who was poised to marry another character, fell ill and, after a long illness, died, precipitating an avalanche of protest mail to creator Sidney Smith’s syndicate at the Chicago Tribune. Daddy Warbucks died twice in Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie. After his first death, in May 1937 of knife and bullet wounds, reader protest was so clamorous that Gray brought him back to life. But he bumped him off again in 1944 as a protest against the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal offended Gray’s conservative sensibilities to such an extent that he decreed that the self-made millionaire Warbucks couldn’t live in FDR’s world. A few months after Roosevelt died in 1945, Gray brought Warbucks back from the grave again. Warbucks explained his reappearance to Annie by saying that “the climate here has changed since I went away.” In the fall of 1941, Milton Caniff famously killed off his plain Jane character, Raven Sherman, having the villain of the moment in Terry and the Pirates shove her off the back of a speeding truck. She lingered for the next 11 days and finally died in the arms of the man who loved her, Dude Hennick. Caniff’s wife had given Raven her name, and the cartoonist joked that Mrs. Caniff never forgave him for killing off “her little girl.” Caniff had killed another supporting character, Old Pop Scott, on January 17, 1935, during the strip’s inaugural episode, mostly to demonstrate that death can happen in a comic strip: no character can be presumed immortal. Andy Lippincott, a gay character in Doonesbury, died of AIDS in 1990, raising awareness of the disease and sympathy for its sufferers. Lippincott is the only fictitious person to have a patch on the national AIDS quilt. Garry Trudeau has killed off other characters—congresswoman Lacey Davenport and her bird-watching husband, Dick, and fat-cat businessman Phil Slackmeyer. And in For Better or For Worse, Lynn Johnston killed the family dog, Farley. Dogs don’t live forever, and Johnston, who has taken great pains to make her strip as realistic as possible, knew the Old English Sheepdog would eventually have to expire, like all family pets do. She arranged a heroic departure: Farley died after saving a child from drowning in 1995. Thanks to Rancid Raves Correspondent Ed Black for the newspaper clipping detailing most of the foregoing. ICON IN BLACK In The New Yorker for January 25, Neil Gaiman is the subject of a profile entitled “Kid Goth” by Dana Goodyear, who, while remarking Gaiman’s extraordinary popularity with certain crowds of young people, misses the secret of his appeal. ... To Find Out What That Secret Is, to Learn about Alan Moore’s New Magazine and Jules Feiffer’s New Book(s), the Names of the Artists and Cartooners Who Founded the Boy Scouts, Playboy’s First Decade (including Jack Cole’s Last Cartoon), How Dominick Fortune Errs, and How Daytripper Succeeds—and More, Much More— You Must Hie Thee Thither to the $ubscriber/Associate Section, Where You’ll Get More of Our News Reports and Penetrating Analysis. To Get There, Click Here. And If You're Not a $ubscriber/Associate— SUBCRIBE
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